No excuse, says US military - but no action taken against 'cowboy' pilot

Scimitar attack inquiry

Profuse apologies and the certainty of an exhaustive official investigation have not quelled British fury over the 28 March "friendly fire" tragedy in which a US aircraft destroyed two Scimitar light tanks, killing one British soldier and wounding three others.

The Pentagon last week refused to identify the unit to which the A-10 Thunderbolt belonged. Nor would it comment on whether the pilot – described by appalled survivors of the incident as behaving like a "cowboy" – was a member of the full-time air force or in the reserves.

But General Richard Myers, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, said there was "no excuse" for such incidents because procedures were in place to prevent them. "It's the absolute saddest tragedy any of us can experience," he declared. "But I don't ever accept that they're inevitable."

But that will not be the end of the matter. "There's some pretty serious dialogue going on here, military to military," one senior British diplomat said. "These things were supposed to have been fixed after Gulf War 1, but it's happened all over again."

The British side is particularly outraged since the A-10 pilot made not one pass but two against the Scimitars, coming in as low as 50ft. Though the weather was totally clear that day, 35 miles north of Basra, he failed to see the clearly marked Union flags on the two vehicles. Only when he was about to make a third run did the pilot heed an order to hold fire.

An investigation will now be held. But however outrageous the pilot's offence, there is no guarantee that he (or she) or anyone else will be punished. Exactly a week before the destruction of the Scimitars, a US Air Force judge recommended that two pilots responsible for the deaths of four Canadian soldiers in Afghanistan in April 2002 should not face courts-martial.

That incident generated as much outrage in Canada as this latest one has in Britain, and a 10-day hearing even found there was sufficient evidence to support criminal charges – which could have led to jail sentences of up to 64 years.

Though "friendly fire" accidents have been fewer than in the 1991 Gulf war, they have still been a leading cause of coalition casualties this time around. But American commanders tend to assume that they are a fact of battlefield life, however unwelcome.

Indeed Donald Rumsfeld, the US Defence Secretary, recently pointed to a US War College Journal study, which produced the astonishing estimate that 13 to 24 per cent of US troops – between 177,000 and 250,000 men – were killed or wounded by fellow American soldiers in the major wars of the last century.